Caribbean Toilets — Trinidad

All of those names apply to the plumbing in this nation of
two major islands just off the South American coast and
beyond the end of the Antilles island chain slightly
outside the Caribbean Sea.
I went to Trinidad to do some Linux security work
for TSTT, the national phone company.
Luckily for me, this was in January.
I left the winter of Indiana for the tropical warmth of
the southernmost islands of the Caribbean.
And, I was there in the period leading up to Carnival,
so I got to see the preparation and hear the bands practicing.
I stayed at the Kapok Hotel while doing the Linux job,
but then I stayed on for a few days on my own and
moved to Pearl's Guest House,
a great place to stay in
Port of Spain,
Trinidad & Tobago.

Pearl's
3-4 Victoria Square East
Port of Spain
+1-868-625-2158

Here you see the exterior of Pearl's.
It's a large house overlooking Victoria Square, a park
taking up a full block.
Pearl and her husband live on the ground floor.
There are guest rooms on the ground floor and on the upper
floor.
There are nice shaded balconies all around.

This is the shared toilet upstairs.
Trinidad uses the North American system:

Raised porcelain commode seats, not squat toilets.

Attach a seat and lid to the bowl.

Clean yourself with paper, not water.

Put the used toilet paper into the bowl,
not into a small rubbish bin.

Yes, in Trinidad they speak English that is much more
British than American, and so they would call it a
"rubbish bin".
If you call it a "trash can", they will probably
understand what you mean as American satellite TV
programming is popular.
That means that they can easily understand Americans
while we struggle with the thick Trini accent.
It's no problem, just part of the fun of visiting.

Why was I in Trinidad?

I was in Trinidad doing some Linux security work for TSTT,
Telecommunications Services of Trinidad & Tobago,
the national phone company.
They were running a mix of Unix family servers and were
moving to a more predominantly Linux environment.
See my page on
travel to Trinidad
for much more on this trip, with lots of pictures.

The Kapok Hotel is in a northern area of Port of Spain.
The job was at a TSTT facility in Chagauramas, out the
peninsula to the west.
I arranged for a driver to take me out there
every morning.
In the evenings I would return on a maxi-taxi,
a shared van similar to a Turkish
dolmuş.

The maxi-taxis run standard routes but not on any
fixed schedule.
They go when they get full enough and pick people up and
let them out along the way.
The vans are built to a standard design, you pick them out
by the colored stripe running all the way around it.
The yellow route, the red route, and so on.
You pay based on how far you ride.
Make sure you have a fistful of TT$ 1 notes.

A yellow line maxi-taxi moves through western Port of Spain.
Yes, vehicles drive on the left in Trinidad & Tobago.

Plumbing

Back to the plumbing situation,
My room at Pearl's had the vital fan and comfortable bed,
plus a sink and a small closet.
The plumbing was down the hall.

The bathtub looks really funky because it has been lined
with small ceramic tiles!
I had never seen a bathtub lined with tiles.
It makes for a very non-slip surface, although I imagine
that cleaning it might be tedious.

The shower head has an in-line electric water heater,
called a "flash heater" as it heats the water
just before it is used.
There is no large reservoir tank of hot water —
the water is immediately heated as it passes through
this combination heater and shower head.

Similar systems are common in Europe.
However, what I was used to seeing was a small
flash heater on the wall just outside the shower.
Water is heated as it passes through the flash heater
and then passes through a short distance of pipe
to reach the shower head.

Notice that the user cannot adjust the temperature in
some of these systems.
The orange knife valve as the pipe runs up the wall
turns the flow off and on.
The flow turns on the heater.
There will be a temperature control on the flash heater,
but it may be controlled by a small screw
and unavailable to the casual user.

This method of mounting keeps the electrical wiring
out where it can be easily inspected.
Don't worry about that dangling green wire, the
electrical ground is provided by the cold water supply.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.